‘Warfare’ a tautly effective portrait of tedium and sheer terror

“Warfare” — 3 stars

For the past 20 years, the modern American war movie has become enthralled with the cult of the operator. From “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty” to “American Sniper,” the traditions valorized in classic Hollywood battle films — camaraderie, physical courage, honor, sacrifice — are expressed, not with jingoistic triumph or misty sentimentalism, but through the more distancing lens of professionalism, competence and laconic, square-jawed hyper-focus.

Those values are on full display in “Warfare,” an engrossing, well-crafted account of a real-life episode during the Iraq War in 2006, when a platoon of Navy SEALs — accompanied by two Marines and two Iraqi scouts — commandeered a house in Ramadi for use as a surveillance location, in preparation for the arrival of ground troops the next day. What they didn’t know was that the house was surrounded by al-Qaida forces; within hours, their outpost would be under siege, their attempts to pull out resulting in catastrophic casualties.

The SEAL in charge of communications that day was Ray Mendoza, who has co-written and co-directed “Warfare” with Alex Garland. Almost exactly one year ago, Garland was making headlines for the edgy speculative military thriller “Civil War”; if the timely bang of that movie wound up being little more than a fizzle, it led to a firmer, more fruitful endeavor with “Warfare”: Mendoza served as Garland’s technical adviser on “Civil War,” and his stories of the disastrous Ramadi mission inspired this collaboration.

Using his memories, as well as the recollections of the men who were there, Mendoza has crafted a taut, harrowing reenactment that initially brings to mind the adage that war can best be described as interminable boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

“Warfare” begins with the platoon jovially watching a suggestive music video, stoking themselves up with bro-tastic bonhomie. Within hours, they will be crouched in a home they have ruthlessly invaded and ransacked, consigning its inhabitants — a terrified Iraqi family — to the bedroom, a steady-eyed sniper patrolling the perimeter through his gun sights while his teammates watch, take notes and keep idle chatter to a minimum. The mood is quiet, subdued — even businesslike — until one of the “Talis” outside tosses a grenade into the house. From that moment on, “Warfare” becomes a harrowing real-time ticktock, wherein the suspense initially lies in whether two wounded troops will be evacuated, then lies in whether any of them will make it out alive.

“Warfare” is a process movie: It’s less interested in character development and “narrative” than in simply plunging viewers into an environment and giving us a sense of what life is like within it. In this case, life is tense, focused, sweaty and fraught with subtle power plays until it erupts into a literal and chaotic fog of war. (This is also a world of absurdist detail, such as the way an injured SEAL’s foot catches on a doorway while his buddy desperately tries to drag him to safety, or the image of gear-laden service members delicately dancing around the severed limbs of their comrades while they strafe a Ramadi street with bullets.)

With few exceptions — shots from a drone’s point of view and a very brief interlude on a rooftop occupied by al-Qaida marksmen — “Warfare” stays within the confines of a few rooms, with David J. Thompson’s urgently subjective camera making them steadily more claustrophobic as the prospects of rescue dim. Still, even with the situation approaching fubar proportions, Mendoza and Garland find opportunities for the inevitable gallows humor. When asked to specify the platoon’s location — for the umpteenth time — an officer played by Will Poulter can barely contain his frustration. “Look for the blood and the smoke,” he deadpans tightly. “We’re there.”

Absent conventional modes of relating to the characters, casting becomes exponentially more important: Garland and Mendoza have assembled a superb cast to portray protagonists who, for all their obvious skill, are unimaginably young. Within an impressive ensemble, Poulter, Charles Melton, Cosmo Jarvis and Taylor John Smith deliver memorable performances as characters to whom, the end credits reveal, they bear an uncanny resemblance; D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai is similarly effective as Mendoza, whose desire to memorialize this otherwise forgotten event evokes yet another common observation: Never has so much been owed to so few by so many. Of course, that phrase was first uttered by Winston Churchill, and his subject was the Battle of Britain. But the statement’s central meaning — about complacency, class privilege and the disproportionate costs of war — has held true for centuries.

Unlike Churchill’s time, the Iraq War era doesn’t lend the comfort of moral clarity: At one point, the wife and mother of the family being held in the bedroom, her house being reduced to rubble around her, cries out, “Why? Why? Why?”

Mendoza and Garland conclude “Warfare” with a montage that manages to be both a healing epilogue and a stinging rebuke, leaving the audience with inescapable questions about what all the training, precision, agony and trauma were for. “Warfare” pays ample and respectable tribute to the How. But it’s that “Why?” that lingers on, long after the blood and smoke have cleared.

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In theaters. Rated R for intense war violence, bloody/grisly images and profanity throughout. 95 minutes.